My lead dog was a lesbian - Brian Patrick O'Donoghue [108]
“None of them knows how to find a trail,” Plettner said. With a sigh, she slouched down against her sled.
After a lengthy pause, word was relayed back up the line that Sepp Herrman was in trouble. That was a jolt. I hated to imagine a situation Sepp couldn’t handle.
More shouting back and forth yielded word that Herrman’s team had charged off a mountain cliff, or something to that effect. Cooley and a few others had heard the trapper shout “help” from below. Doc was leading a party to investigate. Naturally I was curious. But our parking spot was precarious. It wouldn’t take much for the team to bolt and crash into the others directly below us.
“Send a gun!” Cooley’s message was relayed by Urtha Lenthar, who was positioned midway down the hill.
“What?”
“Cooley says to send down a pistol,” Lenthar repeated.
Terhune figured the comment was directed at him. Cooley knew Terhune was packing a large-caliber pistol. Well, the vet was asking the wrong guy for help. Terhune had no intention of lifting a finger to assist Super Trapper. “Fuck Sepp,” he snarled.
I turned to Plettner.
“What could be going on?”
“Maybe he injured some dogs, and Cooley wants to put them out of their agony,” she suggested, shaking her head at the thought.
Throwing my sled on its side, I stuck my borrowed. 357 in my pocket and set forth down the slope. The snow on the hillside was waist-deep. Half-walking, half-sliding past scrubby bushes, I made my way to Urtha.
“Give it to me,” he said, demanding the gun.
“No way,” I said. “It’s my gun, I intend to see how it’s used.”
Joined by Daily, I continued slogging down the hillside. It was a long hike to where Cooley was waiting. Using snowshoes might have been a good idea. It also occurred to me that it was going to be a lot tougher climbing back up.
We found Cooley bent toward the ground, studying tracks left by Herrman and the local musher.
“You brought the gun?” he said.
I handed it to him.
“Good. They must have been attacked by a moose,” Cooley said, aiming his headlamp several feet ahead. “Look at those tracks.”
A line of moose holes stretched across the tracks of both dog teams. The intersection was marked by a large patch of churned snow. “I didn’t want to go any further without a gun,” Doc explained. “Be careful, we might have an angry moose on our hands.”
Shouting Sepp’s name, we trailed the sled tracks into the thickets. It was hard work. Every third step the crust would give way beneath our boots. The effort was wasted. We never found Herrman, or any sign that either musher had so much as paused.
“I just can’t understand it,” said Cooley, who thought very highly of Herrman. “Where I come from, you don’t yell ‘Help!‘ and take off. And I heard him. I know I heard him.”
Later, listening to the story, Terhune decided that Herrman probably did cry for help, and that it was probably a deliberate trick. Now that Herrman was close enough to make it to Nome without bumming dog food, Terhune figured the so-called cry for help was a trick to slow everyone else down. Terhune chuckled at the way Super Trapper had the rest of us fooled.
Cooley and the other mushers at the front of the pack were reluctant to try Herrman’s kamikaze route. But no one could find any markers.
“More of the void,” mused Daily.
By the time I climbed the hill to my team, I was drenched in sweat. Before long, chills were invading my clammy gear. I needed to change clothes before continuing. But everything I had with me was wet. Everything, that is, except my green wool, military-style sweater. As cold as I had been so far, it gave me confidence knowing that I had the sweater in reserve, one more layer in case it got really bad. But I was reluctant to dig it out. If I